Differential Rotation

The role of differential rotation appears to be crucial to the sunspot issue and of the active Sun in general. If the Sun did not rotate differentially, the discussion of the left panel suggests that many of the features that we associate with the active Sun might go away.

But we expect almost all stars to rotate differentially since they are fluids; thus, this is another argument leading us to expect other stars to exhibit periodic magnetic activity of the kind found for the Sun.